[linux-audio-user] Newbie: Realtime kernel and THAC's rpms

[Ketil Thorgersen]

Hi experts and geniuses.

Please be gentle with a newbie who has been using mandrake linux for a couple 
of years, but has staid clear of recompiling kernels etc, and just been a 
happy user.

Up until now I've been using windows as my DAW platform, having a degree in 
sound engineering and being a teacher at a teachers training college. Having 
followed the progress of the music-apps pretty closely and finally found some 
time, I decided to see if I might get my feet wet with linux as a DAW. Since 
I'm familiar with mandrake and found THAC's 
rpms(http://rpm.nyvalls.se/sound9.1.html) I decided to go that route. I've 
been lurking on this forum for a couple of months now, and hope to get some 
help here in the process.

I got me a new harddisk for my DAW machine so that I wouldn't loose anything. 
Installed Mandrake 9.1 (just the basic stuff) Then I installed ardour, jack 
and the kernel-multimedia packages from THAC. I then tried to start jack with 
'jackstart -d alsa -d hw:0'
and got the following response:
"jackstart: cannot get realtime capabilities, current capabilities are:
           =ep cap_setpcap-ep
    probably running under a kernel with capabilities disabled,
    a suitable kernel would have printed something like "=eip"

I did a search on the google, and found out that someone had asked the same 
thing on this list, but the answer was: "look in the faq" - which I then did. 
And the faq say "recompile". I thought the idea of rpms was that I didn't 
have to recompile - but I'm probably wrong.  I just want to make sure before 
i jump onto something which I'd rather not do - because it scares me... (I'm 
a teacher and hobby sound engineer, not a linux wizard, but I'd like to 
learn) So do I have to recompile?


Another thing: I have the staudio dsp24 cport soundcard which was recognised 
and everything, but if anyone has a link or some tips on how to use this in 
the most effective way under linux I'd be very happy! In windows we have a 
virtual patchbay for attaching and rerouting the different ins and outs. How 
do I do this in linux?

I'd be very grateful for all help! Best regards 
Ketil Thorgersen